Sometime in Fall last year I stepped out of the car and looked around at a farmhouse and its surrounding paddocks. There was a barn with its metal roof partially torn off by a recent storm. There were gentle hills all around. There was a big lake and plenty of forest. And there were cows.
‘”How big is this place?” I asked Chris.
“A hundred and forty hectares,” he said.
The previous week I had been looking at properties with 3000 sq m of land. This time I was looking at a property with 140ha – that’s 1 400 000 sq m. I went from looking at village houses to looking at farms. I thought then, and I still think now: How did I get here?
How did I get to looking at farms? I will attempt to explain over the next few posts.
As an aside, these photos are of the first big farm we saw out in Montesqieu-Volvestre in the Haute-Garonne. We didn’t buy it, although it could be a great farm for someone who doesn’t mind the wind. It had so many things going for it: a house that could be extended to fit us. Farmland that was all pasture. It had great subsidies. It was only 45 minutes from Toulouse. For us, part of the reason we moved to the country was that we wanted outdoor kids. This farm was subject to so much wind that everyone would stay indoors on cooler days. And the wind was strong enough to blow the roof off the barn.
grasspunk.com 
Good place to power the house with a wind turbine or two?
Totally. I asked about it at the time, but you need commune permission and that’s hard to get. West of there are a lot of those enormous windmills. You see them as you drive by on the freeway. This farm is at the start of the windy part of the Southwest.
They use solar a lot here. I also hear you can get a barn built for free if you let someone put their solar panels on it.